Nandi Bhatia's new volume, Modern Indian Theatre: A Reader, starts with the necessary task of trying to define exactly what she means by the phrase “modern Indian theater.” One of the basic difficulties that scholars have faced in writing comprehensive books about Indian theater is the sheer variety, complexity, and innumerable hybrid forms in existence. Creating a volume about a genre as nebulous as “modern Indian theater” is a Herculean task, and Nandi Bhatia has done a commendable job of both explaining how she conceives of the genre and selecting texts to illustrate this vision.

In her introduction, Bhatia argues strongly for pushing back the usual dates of the genre to the mid-nineteenth century and breaking its equation with “postcolonial” Indian theater, although only four of the thirty pieces in the volume deal with preindependence India. In Bhatia's vision, “modern” Indian theater is not linked to a particular period, but to a style that combines elements of “traditional and European, classical, folk and ritualistic, and rural and urban forms and practices” (p. xiv) and is characterized by overlapping colonialist, nationalist, and Orientalist positions. The variety of voices and perspectives in this volume clearly illustrates the problems with essentialized narratives of Indian theater that contrast “modern” with “traditional” and equate the former with a loss of “authenticity.”

Bhatia notes a growing scholarly interest in Indian theater history and includes works concerned with both primarily political and primarily aesthetic perspectives. While she includes excerpts from major recent books on Indian theater (Dharwadker, Dalmia, Dimitrova), most of the pieces are scattered elsewhere in edited collections or journals, dating mostly from the last sixty years, with many in Indian journals that are difficult for Western scholars to access. This reader's invaluable contribution is to put a number of important voices in Indian theater criticism, history, and practice all in one place, from the 1876 “Bill to Empower the Government to Prohibit Certain Dramatic Performances,” to the 1953 Indian People's Theatre Association's “Organisational Principles,” to Suresh Awasthi's legendary 1985 piece “In Defense of the ‘Theatre of Roots’” in the journal Sangeet Natak, to Sudipto Chatterjee's 1999 “The Nation Staged” and Mahesh Dattani's 2002 “Contemporary Indian Theater and Its Relevance.”

There are some glaring omissions, particularly theater critic Rustom Bharucha and some of the better-known modern Indian playwrights, such as Badal Sircar, Girish Karnad, and Habib Tanvir, who have all written extensively about their own work and modern Indian theater in general. On the other hand, Bhatia understands that the debates about modern Indian theater did not happen in isolation from other discussions about performance, and she has included Amrit Srinivasan's 1985 landmark essay from Economic and Political Weekly, “Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and Her Dance.” While this piece is not specifically about modern Indian theater, the arguments and strategies that Srinivasan brings to light are broadly applicable. The volume also includes several essays on the interactions of theater with film and television (J. C. Mathur, Kirti Jain).

The sections of the book are organized not by date, but by topic, and each contains selections from a wide range of dates. Given the organization into the subjects of “History, Historiography, and the ‘Modernity’ of Indian Theatre,” “Colonial Influences, Nationalist Self-Expression,” “Interrogating the Nation from the Margins,” “Rethinking the Rural/Urban and Folk/Classical Binaries in Post-Independence India,” “Language, Myth, and Media,” and “Statements,” it would have made sense to include the source information, especially the original date of publication, with each selection rather than at the end of the volume. This would foreground the historical contexts of the individual pieces, as they are so important to the content of the selections. Each section, whatever the topic, is concerned in some way with questions of nationalism and the formation of ideas of nation. This is approached through varying perspectives in articles that address, for example, the woman question (Sudipto Chatterjee, Amrit Srinivasan, Neera Adarkar), Dalit drama (S. Armstrong), Neo-Sanskritic drama (Dimitrova), and Shakespeare (Jyotsna Singh).

The introduction attempts to “provide a contextual history” that will enable an informed reading of the volume, but it might actually be better to read the introduction last. The debates about modern Indian theater, as Bhatia says, are “multi-faceted, hybrid, and contested” (p. xiv), and the introduction and the selections reflect this perfectly. While this is useful in the volume, it is confusing in the introduction, resulting in a tangled narrative. Like the debates themselves, the introduction loops and overlaps and has threads of many different conversations going at the same time, which, while illuminating for those who already are familiar with the debates, is quite confusing for other readers.

This reader is an essential addition to the library of anyone who is interested in Indian or postcolonial performance, or issues of gender, subalternity, and identity in performances of nation.